Issue 145
Winter & Spring 2014
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Welcome to the new TriQuarterly. In addition to the most recent issue and featured content, our homepage now features The Latest Word, a new component designed to keep you up to date with the latest TQ content while providing deeper integration with all of our social media outlets. Additionally, the What’s New page features an infinite scroll of TQ content. Our responsive new design includes upgraded functionality on mobile devices, enhanced audio and video presentation, and improved search functions to promote streamlined content interaction. We’re also expanding our Past Issues section and presenting digitized selections from our rich print archive. We open with TriQuarterly 116, the New Pastoral issue, guest edited by John Kinsella and Susan Stewart. We’ll be adding content regularly, so please check back for updates. We thank our media architect, Harlan Wallach, and his team of technical advisors, Nick Gertonson, Alex Miner, and Rodolfo Vieira, who have designed and built our beautiful new home. We hope you will enjoy exploring the new site, where you’ll continue to find bright, new work from both established and emerging voices.
This issue features compelling new short stories from Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, John Dufresne, and Ron Rash, and an excerpt from Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga’s forthcoming novel, Chronicle of an Indomitable Daughter. We have new poems from Kwame Dawes, Timothy Liu, and Beth Bachmann, along with creative nonfiction from Rilla Askew, Garry Cooper, and Bonnie Nadzam. We are also excited to share three new works of cinepoetry, and a group of poems curated by Mary Hawley of Chicago’s Palabra Pura poetry reading series.
We couldn’t be happier to share Issue 145 and the new site with you. Enjoy the work, and, as always, thank you for reading TriQuarterly.
Cheers,
Matt Carmichael
Managing Editor: Matt Carmichael
Assistant Managing Editor: Dan Schuld
Faculty Advisor: Susan Harris
Literary Editor: S.L. Wisenberg
Director of Planning: Reginald Gibbons
Media Architect: Harlan Wallach
Technical Advisors: Alex Miner, Rodolfo Vieira, Nick Gertonson
Copy Editor: Lys Ann Weiss
Undergraduate Intern: Erik Tormoen
Fiction Editors: Carrie Muehle, Dan Schuld, Ankur Thakkar, Stephanie Tran
Nonfiction Editors: Michelle Cabral, Karen Zemanick
Poetry Editor: C. Russell Price
Social Media Editor: Ankur Thakkar
Staff: Ignatius Aloysius, Ish Harris-Wolff, Ahsan Awan, Rebecca Bald, Jen Companik, Jim Davis, Aaron DeLee, Jesse Eagle, Adrienne Gunn, Beth Herbert, Noelle Havens, Alex Higley, Sarah Hollenbeck, Nath Jones, Jen Lawrence, Adam Lizakowski, Marina Mularz, Amber Peckham, Lydia Pudzianowski, Nate Renie, Mark Rentfro, Paula Root, Tara Scannell, Michi Smith, Travis Steele, Megan Sullivan, Myra Thompson
Image from War Movie
Don't Start Me Talkin' (novel excerpt)
Indiana Northern University appears entirely made of concrete. My alma mater wasn’t Harvard, but we had green places to meet, toss the bee, and ogle ladies. Here, there’s no quaint office of the registrar built at the turn of the century, no frolicking squirrels and tree-lined, undulating brick paths.
A Murder in Four Shorts
I.
Maybe.
A party. A kitchen. A thinning crowd. Near the table, a boy meets a girl. They talk together and laugh. When the boy offers to walk the girl home, she hesitates.
There are dangerous people about, the boy insists.
Mannahatta
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
According to Simon Hart’s 1959 study The Prehistory of the New Netherland Company: Amsterdam Notarial Records of the First Dutch Voyages to the Hudson, published by the City of Amsterdam Press, a certain “Jan Rodrigues,” described as a “mulatto . . . of San Domingo,” sailed to what is now Manhattan, New York, in 1613 aboard the Jonge Tobias, captained and owned by Thijs Volckenz Mossel. Hart continues by pointing out that Rodrigues was “not satisfied on Mossel’s ship and did not wish to go back to Holland with him.”
The Return
Benjamin Miller awoke beneath a shroud of white petals, several of which lay like soft coins over his eyes. The ground trembled vaguely now, the cannon and mortars wheeled elsewhere. He did not hear the explosions, only felt them.
Shadow Work
What We Do
On Mondays we stitch blouses made of organza, christening dresses edged with edelweiss lace. On Tuesdays we work on quilts colored like birds. On Wednesdays we darn, our stitches tiny as a mouse’s eyelash.
Chronicle of an Indomitable Daughter (novel excerpt)
You know you have made the wrong decision when you move in and the room smells worse.
Your landlady hovers around. She says to your wrinkled nose, “Yes, Ms. Sigauke, your God is good to you. You are home now, and see what I have done for you!”